This book tells the story of an Arab neighborhood in Haifa that later acquired iconic status in Israeli memory. In the summer of 1959, Jewish immigrants from Morocco rioted against local and national ...
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This book tells the story of an Arab neighborhood in Haifa that later acquired iconic status in Israeli memory. In the summer of 1959, Jewish immigrants from Morocco rioted against local and national Israeli authorities of European origin. The protests of Wadi Salib generated for the first time a kind of political awareness of an existing ethnic discrimination among Israeli Jews. However, before that, Wadi Salib existed as an impoverished Arab neighborhood. The war of 1948 displaced its residents, even though the presence of the absentees and the Arab name still linger. The book investigates the erasure of Wadi Salib’s Arab heritage and its emergence as an Israeli site of memory. At the core lies the concept of property, as the book merges the constraints of former Arab ownership with requirements and restrictions pertaining to urban development and the emergence of its entangled memory. Establishing an association between Wadi Salib’s Arab refugees and subsequent Moroccan evacuees, the book allegorizes the Israeli amnesia about both eventual stories—that of the former Arab inhabitants and that of the riots of 1959, occurring at different times but in one place. The book uncovers a complex, multilayered, and hidden history and offers uncommon perspective on the personal and political making of Israeli belonging.Less

A Confiscated Memory : Wadi Salib and Haifa's Lost Heritage

Yfaat Weiss

Published in print: 2011-12-27

This book tells the story of an Arab neighborhood in Haifa that later acquired iconic status in Israeli memory. In the summer of 1959, Jewish immigrants from Morocco rioted against local and national Israeli authorities of European origin. The protests of Wadi Salib generated for the first time a kind of political awareness of an existing ethnic discrimination among Israeli Jews. However, before that, Wadi Salib existed as an impoverished Arab neighborhood. The war of 1948 displaced its residents, even though the presence of the absentees and the Arab name still linger. The book investigates the erasure of Wadi Salib’s Arab heritage and its emergence as an Israeli site of memory. At the core lies the concept of property, as the book merges the constraints of former Arab ownership with requirements and restrictions pertaining to urban development and the emergence of its entangled memory. Establishing an association between Wadi Salib’s Arab refugees and subsequent Moroccan evacuees, the book allegorizes the Israeli amnesia about both eventual stories—that of the former Arab inhabitants and that of the riots of 1959, occurring at different times but in one place. The book uncovers a complex, multilayered, and hidden history and offers uncommon perspective on the personal and political making of Israeli belonging.